


Bones

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-02-28
Packaged: 2018-01-14 00:51:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1246543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are mornings in the snowy darkness of winter when I feel as though I could sleep forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bones

There are mornings in the snowy darkness of winter when I feel as though I could sleep forever. On these mornings, the cold finds its way under my clothes as I walk to school, and I never know for certain whether or not I’m still dreaming. I run my gloved hands over the iron bars at the gate, and I see you the same way I see you every morning: you lean against the stone facade with your friends, and your hair is almost white in the glint of the streetlamp. Today, I find myself fascinated by the bloody bruises across your knuckles when you reach out to take a cigarette from one of the others.

You were never really kind to me before, and I suppose nothing has changed even though I now know your secrets. We just move in different circles. Hal once passed along the gossip about you in that mildly curious way of his, though I had already heard the worst of it from the low buzz in the halls. This was before I knew you better, so I thought of you as the privileged type of boy who goes crazy just because he can get away with it.

I hesitate by the gate now, snow gathering over my skin. When you glance across the crowd, high spots of colour flood my cheeks. There you are: a brief white flash of teeth. I pull my book bag closer and hurry inside.

.

Hal and I spread our schoolbooks over the floor of his bedroom, and he undoes the top button of his shirt and throws his blazer over his bed. I can hear his parents downstairs: his father cooking and singing opera at the top of his lungs, his mother laughing exasperatedly. Through the thin windowpane, I can hear the excited shouts of his younger brothers as they tussle in the snow, and Hal catches me listening and smiles.

“This can wait, you know,” he says. “I reckon you’ve memorised it all, anyway.”

“Oh . . . well, I suppose we might go out after.”

He gives a short breath of a laugh and continues to loosen his tie. I think most boys would be embarrassed by the familiar warmth I can hear all around me in this house, but Hal has always clung to it as though surprised by his own happiness. I have grown to love him with each passing year, and in a way, he has always been a part of me: perfect and kind and honest. Sometimes the thought of marrying him makes me smile into my pillow at night, and sometimes it breaks my heart.

I glance back down to our books and my scattered stacks of printed notes. Something like the smell of candle smoke inexplicably echoes in the back of my throat, and I close my eyes in a long, delirious blink. There was a time when I was fascinated by learning, when each perfect test score seemed to validate my existence, but when I think of my life unfolding before me now in the same grey pattern of school days, I want to just fade away.

“Are you okay?” Hal says, brushing his fingers over mine where they lie curled in my lap. Behind the glint of lamplight off his glasses, his eyes are the rainy green of spring.

“Do you ever think there could be more to life than this?” I ask.

“What—more than revising for A-levels, you mean?”

“I mean . . . never mind,” I say, and my voice comes out in a thin halfway laugh. “I don’t know what I meant. I think the stress is just catching up to me.”

I weave my fingers through his. When he leans forward, our knees brush together over the carpet, and I can feel the heat of his skin through his trousers. Things have always been easy and slow with him, and as I close my eyes, I remember the nights he climbed through my bedroom window and sighed into my bare neck.

“We can forget about all that for a while,” he says. His thumb brushes over my cheek, and his lips are warm and soft on mine. “Harriet, what more could there be than this?”

.

You were stumbling through the park like a wounded animal the first time I really saw you. The night before, autumn had rushed through the city all at once with a smell like rain and wood smoke, and the leaves had begun to turn. I was walking to the station when you appeared in the corner of my vision: your left eyebrow was crowned with a bright row of stitches, and the collar of your shirt was rusty with blood. I pulled my coat tighter around my body and contemplated whether to stop.

 _Are you all right?_ I asked, my voice thin and clear in the cold. You paused and looked over as if seeing me for the first time—and perhaps that was the first time for you, even though I had noticed you from the first day of the semester. How could I not have noticed someone who shone as brightly as a dying star?

 _Harriet,_ you said. _It is Harriet, yeah?_

 _Yes,_ I said. Your familiarity finally stilled my feet on the pavement. _Are you . . . do you need me to call someone?_

 _Oh, you mean—am I still drunk?_ you said. _I feel like I could still be drunk._

_Where do you live? I can call you a cab._

_No. I live across the park. What day is it?_

_Monday,_ I said. _Class starts in two hours._

You were watching me the way a bird watches prey, and even though I had never been afraid of the sight of blood before, the stain of it on your collar flooded my mouth with a sick coppery taste. I blinked and looked away. The strap of my book bag was too tight over my shoulder.

 _Have we spoken before?_ you said. _I’m Daniel, by the way._

_I know who you are. Were you in a fight or something?_

_Yeah, something like that. I guess I never learned when to back away,_ you said. _Are you sure we’ve never . . . ?_ You trailed off and reached up absently to run your fingers over the gash in your forehead, and our silence was filled with the sound of a thousand rustling leaves. _I feel like I’m dreaming,_ you said.

.

In the quietest corner of the school library, I sometimes lay my book down over my pleated grey lap and fall into a half sleep against the radiator. The hush of whispers and pages turning is enough to hypnotise me, and my cheeks flood with sleepy heat as I drift off. Sometimes my cloudy thoughts are filled with corridors, and sometimes endless trees, and sometimes sunlight filtering through bed curtains. Sometimes I dream of a place that reminds me of home.

Sometimes I dream of you.

I wonder if everyone else feels so restless. Will there come a time when I’ll be able to look back on the way everything fit together like a puzzle over the years and think, _This is how it was all meant to be_? I have this strange feeling of being an alien in my own life, and there are moments when everything feels the way it feels to walk into someone else’s house. Maybe this will all fade as I grow older and more entrenched in my responsibilities.

“Harriet? The bells have rung.”

I blink awake, and my blurry vision focuses on Hal at the end of the stacks. I am so tired, and when I see him standing there, waiting to walk me to class, part of me wants to close my eyes again, and part of me wants to scream.

“Sorry, I’m coming,” I tell him.

“Here, let me get your books.”

“Thank you,” I murmur as he kneels down and gathers them in his arms. The library floods with sound as the hall door opens and closes intermittently. Beside me, he smells like clean air and mint toothpaste. “Hal?” I say.

“Hmm?”

His fingers brush over my knuckles, and I want to tell him everything. I want to bleed out all the anxiety that has been eating me up over the months, but I remember the sound of his brothers laughing in the snow, his parents calling across the house to one another from downstairs, and I realise all at once that he could never understand.

“No, it’s nothing,” I tell him. “It’s nothing. Let’s get to class.”

.

The last snowfall of the year happens on a Friday night in February, and I wake up to a shadow constellation of snowflakes over my bedroom ceiling. It is almost three in the morning, and my clothes are all cold where they lie folded over the back of my desk chair. I pull on a blouse and cardigan, and I tuck my jeans and socks into a pair of wellingtons before slipping out the same creaky window Hal used to wrench open in the warmer months.

The park is silent under a blanket of snow, and the cold falls in pinpricks over my lips and eyelashes. For the first time in months, my mind is blank, and as I wander further into the night, I notice the spots of blood in the snow with almost academic curiosity. There you are, hunched against the base of a tree, blood staining your mouth like the muzzle of an animal after a kill.

“Daniel?”

You look up at the sound of my voice. “Oh,” you say, as if you expected to see me here.

I am kneeling beside you, and the cold air cuts the smell of alcohol and smoke into something harsher. In the darkness, your eyes are flinty and unmoving, but your hand finds my wrist and your fingers push up over my warm skin. You exhale in a burst of white mist.

“If I asked you to come back to my place, would you come?” you say.

I look away into the darkness of the trees. “You need to pull yourself together.”

“My parents are never home, you know, or is it that you’re still with what’s his face?”

I run my fingers over the corner of your lip, and your blood is hot under my skin. “Why do you do this to yourself? Is it some sort of . . . some sick thrill, or—”

“Do you want to fuck or not?” you say.

I pull away harder than I should. “Of course not.”

You close your eyes and tilt your head back against the tree. I suppose you weren’t expecting an answer either way, and I wonder whether you’ve fallen asleep. After a while, I sit next to you in the snow, and the cold soaks through my jeans almost immediately. The night smells like wet bark, and the trees have bared themselves to reveal a patch of sky overhead, but where I expect to see stars there is only the vaguely orange darkness of clouds over the city.

“I never took you for a Harriet,” you say.

“I never really took you for anything at all,” I reply. My legs are stretched out along yours, and you run your fingers across the wet fabric over my knee. It was an idle motion, something you did without thinking.

“Do you ever think about dying?” you say. “You know when you really think about it, like just before you fall asleep? You realise it’s going to happen to you eventually, and there’s that excited sort of fear that winds through your chest.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s sort of what getting hit feels like, all at once,” you say. “I know it sounds crazy. I mean, my doctors think it sounds crazy.”

“No, I understand.”

“Really?” you ask, and you exhale with a dizzy sort of laugh.

“Really, I understand. Sometimes I feel so out of place in my own body that I want to scream,” I tell you. “Sometimes the world just seems grey.” It came out too quickly, and I bring my fingers up to my lips as if I could pull the words back. “Only . . . I feel as though somewhere else, another me is living an entirely different life.”

Your sigh flits over my neck in the cold, and I turn to find you facing me. Your eyes are the grey of wet stone, and you trace your way up the side of my body and around the back of my head, your fingers tangled in my hair. For the briefest moment, I close my eyes and hear the silence of trees. Your kiss is cold and hard.

“I’m sorry,” you say when I pull away.

“No, it’s all right. It’s just—this can’t happen with us.”

“I know,” you say. Your hand falls away from my skin, though we could lie here forever in the weeds and dirty snow. When I run my tongue over my bottom lip, I taste the echo of your blood, and my vision floods with vivid spots of blackness as I stagger to my feet.

“I’m happy with Hal,” I say.

“All right. I’m sorry.” You stand and catch my fingers before I can leave, and the silhouettes of branches rise up behind you like the antlers of a beast. My body is alien, my lips and fingers alien. Perhaps I am possessed.

“In another place, maybe,” I hear myself saying. “We could—in another time, or . . .”

“It’s all right, Harriet. It’s all right,” you say, and you let my hand fall.

I exhale, and everything swims back into clarity. There you are: just a boy, just confused—a stranger. I turn and run back to the road, to the reassuring lights of the city. My fingers shake on the latch to my bedroom window, and the flat is silent when I pull my clothes off and stand shivering and naked in the darkness. I know your secrets, and you know mine, and this is where it ends.

The school gate will rise like a ghost in the morning fog, and I will see you the same way I have seen you every morning. The days will pass in their same grey rhythm, and I will feel time wash over me and through my bones.

Sometimes I will dream of a place that reminds me of home. Sometimes I will dream of you.

.

Hal tucks my hand against his in the pocket of his coat. We are walking along the street in front of his house, and I can see his family laughing together through the sheer lace curtain strung across their sitting room window. His eyes reflect pinpricks of light from the streetlamps overhead.

“Have you ever thought about going abroad for uni?” he asks.

“Why, have you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was just a thought.”

“No, I mean—I’ve never really considered it,” I say. Our boots crunch in the snow, and we both wobble for a moment on a patch of ice on the pavement. At the sight of me, Hal dissolves into laughter, and I find myself clinging to his arm. He has always been taller than I am, and I press my forehead to his shoulder.

“Would you consider it with me?” he finally says. “I want to see the rest of the world with you.”

The street is quiet, lit windows and melting snow. All around us, people are putting their children to sleep, or watching television, or sitting across tables from one another and wondering what direction their lives will take. “Hal . . .”

“You don’t have to answer right away.”

“No, I mean—Hal, I do want to.”

“Really?” he says. When he smiles, the years disappear from his face, and he transforms into the boy I have known since childhood. “Would you really come with me?”

“Yes,” I say, and it comes out in a breathy laugh. “Yes, of course I would. Do you think . . .”

“What is it?”

“Hal, do you think, if we were born in another time or—do you think we would still love each other?”

We stand together under the halo of the streetlamp, and I am aware of every cell in my body. He clasps my hands tighter in his, and the air is cold and wet with the promise of rain.

“I think I would love you from the moment I saw you,” he says. “I hope I would.”

“Mm-hmm,” I murmur. I reach up and brush his wild hair away from his eyes, tracing my finger over the faintest scar on his forehead, the curve of his cheek. I memorise every plane of his face. “I think so, too.”

He pulls me close, and I inhale the cold smell of winter against his coat: wood and snow, something like cinnamon. When I see you again, the memory of him will burn in my heart until he is all I see, and the echoing corridors of my mind will finally fade away. What more could there be than this?

**Author's Note:**

> I had a series of existential crises re: changing or not changing the names for a seriously AU fic (one doesn't meet many Dracos IRL) so please let me know if it absolutely didn't work for you!


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